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Aaron Swartz's Reckless Activism

Aaron Swartz, just 24 years old, is having an interesting life. He played a key role in developing the RSS spec at the age of 14, and he made his fortune by selling his stake in Reddit to Conde Nast before he was old enough to drink. Now, at the age of 24, he finds himself facing criminal charges arising from his efforts to download millions of documents from the academic archive JSTOR.

The New York Times first reported on Aaron’s authorship of a document called the “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto.” It’s been taken offline, but it’s quoted extensively here:

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.

I have a great deal of sympathy for Aaron’s open-access goals. The standard argument for copyright is to incentivize the creation of new works, but academic authors are paid by their respective institutions to produce research and distribute it to the world. As Matt Blaze has written, the academic journals and professional societies that claim the copyrights on these works and then charge libraries exorbitant fees for access have become essentially parasitic, making a great deal of money while doing very little of value. I think it’s inevitable that academic research will become freely available for online download, but the pace of change has been agonizingly slow.

Still, Aaron’s methods were reckless and counterproductive. For starters, walking into someone’s networking closet and hooking your equipment up to a switch without permission is almost never OK, and it’s definitely not OK if the objective is to evade the network owner’s previous attempts to block you from the network. The conflict between Aaron and JSTOR led to the entire MIT campus being cut off from JSTOR access for several days, doubtless affecting the productivity of hundreds of MIT scholars.

But the more lasting cost of Aaron’s actions will likely be to the reputation of the open access movement. Open access advocates have the natural high ground and are gradually winning the debate over the future of academic publishing. Change comes slowly, but things have been changing. Aaron’s actions are likely to slow that progress by allowing the bad guys to lump open access advocates in with malicious clowns like LulzSec. The incident makes JSTOR look like an injured, even magnanimous, party and gives them an excuse to make their policies more restrictive.

And ultimately, it’s not clear what the point was. Even if Swartz had obtained the entire JSTOR archive and released a copy of it onto the darknet, it’s not clear how that would meaningfully advance the goals of the open access movement. Normal people are not going to hop on BitTorrent and download a multi-terrabyte document dump.

To be sure, it’s ridiculous that Aaron’s facing felony charges for non-violent actions that caused no lasting damage. Aaron’s actions are in a very different moral category from LulzSec-style “hacking,” and the law ought to reflect that with a much less severe penalty. It would be unjust and a terrible waste of Aaron’s considerable talents if he spent multiple years in jail. But it’s not “strange” or “bizarre” that he would face charges for repeatedly trespassing on MIT property to gain unauthorized access to the MIT network. And while open access supporters should certainly object to the harshness of the penalties being contemplated here, it would be a mistake to transform him into a saintly folk hero of open access.

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Honestly, no one has thought to report that Demand Progress, the organization Aaron co-founded, was incredibly effective in sinking the bill S. 978 in the polls. Everywhere you look, the public, once made aware of what it was, acted sharply against it. A month later, Aaron is arrested for what is essentially taking what we’ve already paid for with our tax money. Why haven’t journalists asked about those two things? Two seconds of research into the private backers of S. 978 would arch the eyebrow of any decent journalist.

Mr. Lee states, “Change comes slowly, but things have been changing,” as if change is naturally supposed to just happen, like erosion or tectonic shifts. Change happens because a large enough portion of a population gets fed up with an existing injustice. Mr. Swartz’s actions, while perhaps personally reckless, are those of one brave enough to focus the public’s attention to these issues.

Access to media and control over digital media is becoming MORE restrictive, not less so. Back in the 80s there was a protracted court battle regarding software purchases. When individuals bought software, but lost the media on which it was stored, software companies charged those individuals the full price of the software package for replacements, but would then go after those same individuals for making copies. When challenged, the courts said the software companies couldn’t have it both ways…what they were selling was EITHER a license to use the software (in which case use could be limited according to the license), or a physical good (in which case, the purchaser owned the material and could do anything with it), but not both. Fast forward to today. No one questions that if I buy a DVD of Little Big Man, what I receive is a license to watch that movie under certain conditions. But what if that DVD becomes damaged? Can I write to the publisher and get another copy at media cost? No. Why? Because lawmakers are captured by large corporate interests who will do anything to protect their largely rent-seeking derived “profits”.

We saw this with digital music and the endless barrage of “copying is theft” messages from media giants. Copying can SOMETIMES be theft, but it shouldn’t be the presumption. Mr. Swartz is exactly the type of personality we need to start moving the needle back to a more reasonable position. His noble acts may have been interleaved among those which are not-so-noble, for which he may find himself in trouble, but change does not just happen, even if slowly, WITHOUT those willing to risk everything like Mr. Swartz.

Sit-ins are trespasses. Assembling without permits sometimes runs afoul of laws upheld as Constitutional. Would you have called the students who locked themselves in Low Library at Columbia University in 1968 reckless? Or were they gutsy enough to challenge authority where authority was the one more properly deserving of that moniker?

Instead of pointing out the flaws in his plan, you should be singing the praises of the legitimacy of his ideas. Remind me again why law.resource.org (free and universal access to statutes and other public documents defining laws that we’re all expected to follow, and to which ignorance is not a defense to punishment for violation) is so terrible an idea. Remind me why we don’t have that already.

selenedrac is probably right that this is a bit of retaliation for Mr. Swartz’s admirable and successful recent participation in the political process. $100k seems pretty steep for this sort of “crime”. But in a way I think this overreaction, which Swartz or anyone else could have predicted based on previous prosecutorial overreactions, plays right into his hands. It’s not really civil disobedience until they slap the irons on.

JSTOR in particular is not important. I’m sure all of its “non-profit” officers are well-compensated for their role in this parasitism of the human knowledge, but that doesn’t matter. JSTOR and other parties like it are in a very vulnerable position. They neither produce nor consume their product, and since they add no value (when you consider their cost they actually subtract) their business model depends on both producers’ and consumers’ continued patient suffering. Every day another researcher decides “to hell with all that” and places his papers directly on arxiv.org. Most conferences are still stuck in the previous millennium, but even that is starting to change. “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Mr. Swartz would like more researchers and academics to get with the times, and the larger his bail, the more attention he’ll get.

I don’t see how aarons actions were any worse then demonzing a mans actions in a major publication with out fact checking first. Unless you are writing with a bias, but shody workmanship seems akinder assumption.

Aaron was at no point trespassing, he had legal access at all times, heck even the overzealous justice department dropped the pysical trespassing charges, despite later adding more computer crimes charges. Add to that he violated no term of service agreements, and MIT leaves its network wide open for the purpose of playing with it, the criminal actions you atribute to him turn out to be little more then a faux pas.

Were his actions wise? No, but to indicate they were blatantly criminal is just silly. This was a civil matter not a crimial one.